Teachers judging without scripts, or thinking cosmopolitan

Abstract

A cosmopolitan ethic invites both an appreciation of the rich diversity of values, traditions and ways of life and a commitment to broad, universal principles of human rights that can secure the flourishing of that diversity. Despite the tension between universalism and particularism inherent in this outlook, it has received much recent attention in education. I focus here on one of the dilemmas to be faced in taking cosmopolitanism seriously, namely, the difficulty of judging what is just in the context of an increasingly divergent public—and classroom—discourse about values, rights and equality. I propose in what follows that judgement cannot rely on any script, even one as attractive, perhaps, as cosmopolitanism. To explore what is at stake in making judgements in an educational context, I draw on both Hannah Arendt's and Emmanuel Levinas's notions of judgement and thinking. The paper discusses the educational significance of thought and judgement as conditions for reframing the universalism–particularism problem found in a cosmopolitan ethic. My argument is that there is a world of difference between educating for cosmopolitanism, which entails a faith in principles, and ‘thinking cosmopolitan’, which entails a hope in justice for my neighbours.

Keywords:

• Cosmopolitanism
• Judgement
• Thinking
• Arendt
• Levinas
• Teachers
• Universalism
• Particularism

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the funding provided by the Swedish National Research Agency for the project Gendering the Cosmopolitan Ethic: A Feminist Inquiry into Intercultural and Human Rights Issues in Education, which made the writing of this paper possible.

Notes

Notes

1.  Breckenridge et al. (2002) write, ‘specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitively is an uncosmopolitan thing to do’ (p. 1), precisely because it invokes an openness to the indefinite and gestures to an unknown ‘beyond’ of the nation-state.

2.  Although I am focusing here on the specifically European features of cosmopolitanism, I also wish to draw readers’ attention to the way this discourse is not necessarily purely western. See, for example, Zubaida (2002) and van der Veer (2002) in Vertovec and Cohen (2002) for discussions of cosmopolitanism outside the west. My use of the term ‘ethic’ here is not meant to suggest that all writers who advocate for cosmopolitanism do so under the name of an ‘ethic’, but they do commonly agree on a shared set of values that are central to their cosmopolitan outlook, and it is this to which I am referring: world citizenship, empathy with global ‘neighbours’, commitment to human rights, respect for human diversity in all its manifestations.

3.  Martha Nussbaum (2003), for one, interweaves this attention to cultural pluralism with a commitment to universal principles of human rights in her call for educational reform. Moreover, calls for global or world citizenship in education which similarly take up the twin projects of human rights and respect for cultural diversity have proliferated in recent years (Osler and Starkey, 2003; Noddings, 2004; Kemp, 2005).

4.  For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Todd (in press). Also, Derrida (2002) identifies yet another contradictory imperative within cosmopolitanism: conditional and unconditional hospitality. The latter is that which cosmopolitanism offers to all people, regardless of origin or residence; the former is the inevitable limitations placed upon one's right of residence in a specific territory, land, or state.

5.  For differences within the literature on cosmopolitanism, see for example Derek Heater's (2002) discussion, which takes a more equivocal position and focuses on the pros and cons of cosmopolitan and communitarian arguments with respect to world citizenship. Appiah (2006), in his discussion of cosmopolitanism and its ethical dimensions, focuses on commonalities across differences (particularly with respect to certain ‘universal’ values) and makes appeals to ‘humanity’ without sufficiently addressing the specific tensions between rights and human pluralism that inevitably arise when discussions are forged on how and who is to decide on what is common between us.

6.  See Arendt's discussion on these points in more detail in the first book of The life of the mind: Thinking (1978).

7.  Although Arendt (1978) discusses in Willing, the second book in The life of the mind, that the I returns to the world in action where ‘a We is always engaged in changing our common world, stands in the sharpest possible opposition to the solitary business of thought, which operates in a dialogue between me and myself’ (p. 200), she nonetheless does not attribute to the Will the capacity to aid in making judgements. Will, though central to Arendt's conception of political action and freedom, is little discussed in direct relation to the connection between thinking and judgement.

8.  See Todd (2007).